MEMORIES

Diane Strachan

“The professionals went to the damaged areas, worked with the suffering and took notes on everything they saw.”

Diane (Southall) StrachanReno, Nevada

My home at 4401 S.W. Twilight Drive was among the first rows of houses the tornado leveled as it came over Burnett’s Mound and traveled through Topeka. The house was gone, and my parents had survived in the basement. I was downtown at a choir rehearsal near the Capitol. The rest of the night was chaos.

A friend’s dad picked us up downtown and tried to take me home. We were unaware of the damage as we drove on I-470 behind my house, because there were no lights where the homes used to be — all we could see was complete darkness.

I spent the night trying to find my family. We could not drive into my neighborhood because the streets were impassable. Eventually, I was taken to my grandmother’s house near Topeka High School, where my parents, too, eventually arrived. What a relief!

We spent several days going through the rubble, trying to find any belongings that we could, but there wasn’t much left intact. Strangely, we found many of the pieces of my mother’s sterling silver flatware, but I don’t remember finding much else.

There was a large tree that had come through the front window of our basement, even though there had been no such trees in the neighborhood, because it was a fairly new subdivision. Family photos were gone; valuables and collections were gone. My birth certificate was later returned to me from St. Joseph, Mo., over 70 miles away as the crow, or in this case, the tornado flies.

My cat, who had been in the basement with my parents when the tornado hit, had disappeared. He turned up a few weeks later, but he was never quite right after that. We stayed in an apartment by Mount Hope Cemetery while the house was being rebuilt and had the cat with us, but he kept running away and traveling back to the old neighborhood. After we moved back into the new house, he stayed with us for a while, but eventually he left and never returned.

My parents were never quite right after that either, and they divorced a year later. Neither my mother nor I could ever bring ourselves to watch the movie “Twister.” Now, I live in Nevada and have not seen a tornado in the 31 years I’ve been here, nor in the 11 years I lived in Colorado before that. Sometimes, though, when I’m feeling overwhelmed by decades of accumulated junk, I can’t help thinking a good tornado would sure give me a fresh start!